The House at Sugar Beach

by Helene Cooper (Simon & Schuster; $25)

Cooper is a descendant of the Congo People—the élite who once governed Liberia—and can trace her ancestry to the freed American slaves who colonized the country in the eighteen-hundreds. In 1980, she and her family fled Monrovia following a coup; her mother was raped and, on her fourteenth birthday, a cabinet-minister cousin was publicly executed. Decades later, as a reporter in Washington, D.C., she is impelled by stories from a disintegrating Monrovia to return, to “the ninth circle of hell, where ten-year-olds were taken from their parents and forced to fight in the country’s never-ending civil wars.” She sets out to find a foster sister whom she hasn’t seen in twenty-three years, and who represents her childhood self, her Liberian voice. Despite a sometimes flip tone, there is tenderness in this memoir, and Cooper is clear-eyed even as she tells of her loss. ♦